


Galactic Interaction

by G_J_Smith



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Canon-Compliant levels of emotional constipation, Comfort/Angst, Doug Eiffel presumed dead in Space Miami, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Pining, Pre-Relationship, mentions of Lovelace's first crew, pretentious use of scientific concepts I only kind of understand as metaphor, set between Pan-Pan and Securite, they argue then cry and hug it out, which neither of them recognize as pining nor mutual yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-25 12:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22256152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/G_J_Smith/pseuds/G_J_Smith
Summary: In which feelings - a variety of them - get a little out of hand.Inspired by Kat Deliverusfromsburb saying "I could believe Minkowski and Lovelace kissed once between Pan-Pan and Securite and then never talked about it" in a Discord chat, an idea that promptly sent me into a gay fugue state and when I woke up, I had written nearly 6k words about it.
Relationships: Isabel Lovelace/Renée Minkowski
Comments: 9
Kudos: 39





	Galactic Interaction

When Hera told Lovelace that Minkowski needed her in the crew quarters, she was expecting it had something to do with the hydraulics, or pressurization, or something like that. They'd have to give up on the entire section any day now, seal it off and shut it down, then cross their fingers that cutting down on the mechanical stress as much as possible would slow down the spreading stress fractures. But instead, she found Minkowski standing alone, outside a cabin door that hadn't been opened in over 180 days. 

After years spent living in a giant metal maze, Earth could feel like a distant abstraction at even the best of times. Like plants that grew in actual dirt instead of a hydroponics tank were just an interesting idea, instead of something Lovelace had seen, felt, and hiked through and given poison ivy rashes by for literally all of her human life. Her hometown, the neighborhood she grew up in, the bases she'd lived on, outposts she'd commanded - all of those internal maps grew less distinct and detailed by the day. Instead it was just the station, the station, the station, the home, prison, and possibly-actual-personal-hell that had been slowly dying for... god only knew how long. Time had a funny way of working around here. The two months since almost freezing to death and Minkowski owning up about the cracks had felt like nothing at all in motion, and at the same time, forever ago, each moment drawn out as they worked day in and day out on hospice care duty, a routine she and Hilbert were already horribly familiar with. If it weren't for the updates she'd had to make to her mental map of the station, she'd probably have drifted down to the hangar bay on muscle memory alone, before coming back to the present with a gut-wrenching lurch. Some days station repair even felt like taking care of a dying patient, crawling around inside its body like little cartoon helpers that you drew to represent whatever biological function or whatever, _we don't even exist, we're just a clever visual metaphor used to personify the abstract concept of thought..._

Give her the pipe dream of the shuttle repair any day. At least that had an endgame she could work for. Whether it was for Decima-stricken crewmates or the station itself, sitting around and waiting for the end always felt too much like just giving up. Never something she'd been able to handle with much grace. So even if "the end" in this case might just be Marcus Cutter's goons waving a flashlight a little further down the tunnel, something about seeing Minkowski in front of _that door,_ shoulders set, hands at her sides... made a familiar kind of dread creep up on her.

Out of pure muscle memory, Lovelace grabbed onto a handhold and hung back until the rest of her brain caught up. She knew before she even had to think about it; two turns headed to the deck above would put her just outside of the comms room, and you'd probably want a communications officer bunking in quarters that were close to-

Ah.

So that was what Minkowski had called her up for.

The sound of her grabbing the handhold made Minkowski jolt and turn around like she'd been startled - she hadn't been going _that_ fast, had she? - as Lovelace pushed off towards her again, pushing aside the unwanted vision of herself from years before, in the same place and for the very same reason. "Hey, I'm here. What's up?" she called. 

"Oh, hey," Minkowski replied as she approached, without the iron Lovelace was used to. A bad sign. "...thanks for coming up, Captain."

There was no reproach in her voice, just grief, disguised by gentle gratitude. But the closed door in front of them stood like a silent accuser. If anyone except Minkowski had asked her to help clear his quarters, Lovelace would have believed it was intended to punish her - but not Minkowski. Even if Lovelace noticed how she couldn't quite look her in the eye at the moment. 

Neither of them reached for the handle yet. You couldn't really shuffle your weight from foot to foot in zero-gravity, but Minkowski had that same kind of anxious energy about her, folding her arms across her chest, as though something about the quiet demanded she explain herself. "I wouldn't have asked, but..."

"Yeah, don't worry, I've been here before," Lovelace said, deciding to spare them both the second she heard Minkowski's voice start to waver. Better that they just got this over with. This was one of the responsibilities of the commander, but it was one you hoped like hell you never had to deal with. So sometimes, when shit happened, you needed help to deal with it. That was fine. 

"I thought about asking Hilbert-" Minkowski cut in, like an apology -- _but we both know he was using our communications officers as lab rats now. But he's a cold, calculating career sociopath who'll remind you to be_ professional _when things have gone so far outside normal parameters, we can spot their fly-by from the station's windows. But I need somebody who's been through this before and doesn't think having a soul is an unfortunate design flaw._ All would've been fair enough -- But Minkowski didn't give any further explanation. Maybe she hadn't even thought about the 'why' until Lovelace had said something.

"It's fine," Lovelace said, carefully measuring the syllables. "Really," she added, when she failed to avoid the sharp edges in her words the first time around. She didn't need an explanation, or even really want one. It'd just drag this whole damn thing out. It was fine, she would help Minkowski get this done so she could mourn Eiffel however she needed to, and they could get back to outsmarting their own impending doom, and it would be _fine._

But Minkowski insisted. Tentatively, like she was blowing the wind back into her own sails. Trying to rally herself back to her Commander voice. "I know in... in cases like this, it's regulation to clear out crew quarters no later than one week after... they're... no longer in use..."

"Minkowski."

It hadn't been meant as a warning- okay, no, that was a lie. It _was_ a warning about invoking regulation, and _that_ specific regulation, in this specific place, when she was asking her to clean out their communications officers' quarters _(again)_. What it hadn't been was a rebuke - which was what Minkowski had heard, evidently.

"I've been trying to get this done all week!" Minkowski snapped. At least getting defensive made her sound like herself again. "I've _been_ trying, ever since after I sent out the distress call, but I just- I don't think that I can-"

"Those _'regulations'_ were put in place by a bunch of heartless bureaucrats to keep business going as usual without the humanity of the people who have to actually _deal with the fallout_ getting in the way," Lovelace said, feeling an old rage lick at her insides over that stupid rule and the way it forced you to _quit feeling so you could hurry up and get back to work, already._ "And maybe you've noticed, Minkowski, but we're pretty damn far from the parameters of _business as usual_ right now, so don't let some asshole with a cushy office light years away from here make _you_ feel ashamed for having the sheer goddamn nerve to act like an actual _human being._ "

It came out with more fire than Lovelace had intended, but goddamnit, she meant it. _Had_ meant it, ever since Fisher died. But back then, she'd had a crew that needed a leader. She'd had lives under her care that needed to go on. Now it was just these four fractured survivors, and the paper-shredder strands of hope they'd been forced to place in the people who had sent them out here to die in the first place. And right here, right now, in the keenly-felt absence of the person who'd had the sheer goddamn nerve to never let anything stop him from acting like a person -

Well, it was like trying to hold out during the deep freeze. You cracked eventually.

Except now Minkowski looked like she might actually start crying.

Shit. Backpedal, Isabel, backpedal.

"...Sa- Lambert was the one who got after me about the regulation," Lovelace reluctantly admitted, the words tumbling out past her blast shields when Minkowski hadn't returned fire, or told her off for insubordination, or something. "...After the first time, with Fisher. When I was putting it off. I think it was his way of telling me I had to be a grown-up and deal with it. Of course, all I heard back then was more tone-deaf micro-managing..."

Lovelace trailed off, hands finding themselves on her hips and eyes on a point somewhere around Minkowski's left ear. Leaving it there didn't make it the most... flattering of stories, but whether it was pride stopping her or something else, she decided that no, actually, telling Minkowski's about how she'd forced herself to clear Sam's quarters exactly a week after his passing, on her own, just like regulation, would've been an... unnecessary tangent.

"So... so if that's you, Minkowski, if this is something _you_ have to do-" she tried instead, "then okay. I'm fine lending a hand either way."

Lovelace dared eye contact then. Commander Minkowski had that forced stillness of someone struggling to hold themselves together, her face set to keep her lips from trembling, breathing deeply and saying nothing until she could speak around a closed-off throat.

"I just... I don't know what I kept telling myself," Minkowski finally said, like she was at last considering casting off some of the weight of the world. "The supplies on board that shuttle would've run out weeks ago, and even if there's a way Eiffel could still be alive-“ her voice cracked on his name. “...no rescue is ever going to find him."

In her words was the void that was now creeping into the station day by day, the pressureless vacuum somehow as heavy and crushing as the bottom of the ocean as every effort to alive in their tiny bubble of warm, breathable air only deepened the stress fractures in the hull. They'd hit the lower bound of Hera's estimates a few days ago; 60 days down, anywhere from 60 to none to go. Any rescue that might be coming was racing an unreliable clock.

If any rescue was coming at all.

"…sometimes…" Lovelace tried, as much as she wanted to point out all the ways Eiffel could still be out there, somewhere, like if life support had made it through the explosion, if the cryostasis unit was still functional, but... "you reach a point where it’s no use wondering anymore. You just focus on what’s in front of you, and the people you can still save."

“…yeah. I know.” 

Minkowski's admission hung in the air for a moment, before Lovelace got the sinking feeling that’d actually been the wrong thing to say. Minkowski looked up at her, her eyes suddenly wet and shining. "Eiffel's… gotta be dead by now, hasn't he?"

And with that, the Commander broke.

Hearing the sob that forced its way out of Minkowski’s throat made anything else she might've said die on Lovelace’s lips. This was what she’d been trying to avoid, because she was _bad_ at this part. At any other time in her life, her solution would’ve been to pull Minkowski back up, to tell her to _focus_ , that there was still work to be done, a problem to be fixed, people who needed their Captain. It was who she was: Isabel Lovelace _kept going_ , and she kept other people going. Because when you stopped, if you quit trying for even a second, there was nothing to block out the voice that whispered it was _your fault, your fault, your fault._

She was bad at this part. When the problem was not something you could fix, and the best you could hope to do was hold down the fort and ride out the storm. When what her people really needed was somebody who could stop and help them catch their breath.

_Your fault, your fault, your fault._

...And what fucking right did she really have, anyhow? Eiffel was either dead or dying, slowly and alone, and his blood was on her hands. Who the hell was she to try and comfort the people grieving him? If anything, it would’ve helped if, Minkowski would take Hera’s lead and just _\- get mad,_ blame her for it all, so at least then she could’ve had an outlet instead of using herself as a punching bag. At least then Lovelace could’ve served as a lightning rod, she could take it, she could handle that, because it would’ve been _something_ she could _do._ Because the alternative was-

The alternative was something she couldn't afford. The thing about breaking down was that it took too damn long to get back up, because it gave an opening to all those thoughts of _your fault_ once your took off the armor. You couldn’t _do_ that when you had people who needed you.

Minkowski still had people who needed her. And, well -- who the hell needed Isabel Lovelace right now, exactly?

And yet, she could only stand there, unable to help in the way Minkowski needed and unwilling to drag her back onto her feet as the Commander fought to get herself back under control.

Minkowski caught Lovelace’s eye and lowered her gaze again, blinking hard and sending little tear droplets floating into the air. "...sorry, " she mumbled, and gave her the barest attempt at a laugh, before a wet sniffle undercut the effort. Her hands were still balled up tight at her sides. "God, I must look like such an embarrassment right now-"

"You're not."

Isabel surprised them both by grabbing Minkowski by the shoulders as she forced her words past a sudden tremor in her throat. "Don't you say that about yourself, Minkowski, not to me."

Any further and her own voice would’ve started to shake. Lovelace held herself steady, hands firm, the unsaid _not when I’m what killed him_ echoing in her head. Minkowski looked taken aback, even startled by her gesture, but didn’t push her away.

"...thank you, Captain,” she finally said, “But..."

“But _nothing_ , Minkowski, I'm not just gonna stand here and let you call yourself a failure when you _haven't failed yet_.”

“And what exactly have I _done_ that's so worthy of your admiration, hm?” Minkowski fired back, backing out of her grasp, both of them now shaken from their paralysis.

Lovelace scoffed, “What've you done? All I'm doing is stating a fact, you're still breathing and we're not all dead yet. If anything, I wanna know what you think _I’ve_ done that you keep _\- looking_ at me like you need my approval about anything!”

“Because!” Minkowski threw her hands up, “because of everything! Because of what you've been through! You've had to do this _four times_ , and you still made it this far! Further, even! You survived, you fought to lead the way out of this place and here I am, sitting on my hands and waiting to either be rescued or die!

“And where exactly are the people I led now?”

“Where the hell are mine?”

And with that, Minkowski doused the fire. Hell, she might as well have taken an axe to a hydrant. The one thing to make it through the cracks in Lovelace's armor and hit that open, throbbing wound Minkowski had so carefully avoided aggravating for months, and she hadn’t even meant it that way.

“...gone,” Lovelace said, as Minkowski’s look of wounded defiance turned to horror and Lovelace knew she was about to try and take it back. But no, she _needed_ to hear herself say it out loud and have it be heard: “Eiffel's gone because of me.”

“...it wasn't-“

“It _was_ ,” she insisted. “My shuttle, my bomb, my heartbeat, my _stupid,_ stubborn decisions- I killed him, and _I’m_ _sorry._ ”

It wasn’t enough, and it never would be. God, nothing ever would be. But even if she already knew what Minkowski was going to say, it was a relief to just _say it._ Some wounds needed stitches, and stitches meant stabbing at yourself with something sharp.

Minkowski was quiet, her eyes still watery as she no doubt turned over her response in her head. Both of them knew both sides of this argument already. But some things needed to be said out loud.

“Part of that stupid decision saved my life,” Minkowski said softly, “and the only reason the station's still in the sky right now is because before that, you saved his life, too. Don't ask me to forget how you've helped us, Captain.”

“Because I was being so helpful before Hera had to surgically remove my head from my ass...” Lovelace grumbled. She knew she had ultimately paid Hera back by taking her best friend away for good, and that made it easy to be defiant. “…You see why I don't think you're an embarrassment, Commander? _You_ never had to do that. When push came to shove, you never had to be reminded what was actually important. And I know I never had to field a wildcard like me, yet alone a glitching AI, a known murderer, and a station we have to fight 'round the clock so that maybe, it'll _only_ kill us slowly enough for Goddard's cavalry to come save our sorry asses!”

“ ...if they're coming at all,” Minkowski admitted, eyes on the floor again. It was a thought they'd all been having without wanting to think it. Sixty days with no response. On average, it took seventy days to travel to Wolf 359 on a sublight arc. They'd all been doing the math on when they'd know how doomed they really were.

But because she was bad at waiting around and giving in, Lovelace took a chance in reaching out again, tipping Minkowski’s chin up and giving her a small smile to walk her back from admitting defeat.

“Give yourself some credit, Commander _,_ ” she said, putting playful emphasis on the title, “you got dealt a really shitty hand, but to make it this far? You had to have played your cards well.”

Minkowski gave Lovelace a tremulous smile of her own for her efforts, before... also reaching out towards her. Lovelace froze, unsure at first of what was happening, and then of _why_ it was happening, as Minkowski carefully wrapped her arms around her shoulders and pulled herself in for a hug.

And for whatever reason, Lovelace didn't want to push her away.

"Thank you, Captain," Minkowski said quietly, "It really does mean a lot to me, hearing you say that, whatever you think of yourself." 

She gave her a gentle squeeze as she spoke, her chin perched on Lovelace's shoulder, and the... sensation, the warmth of another human being wrapping around her, seemed to shake off some of the rust. Oh right, you're supposed to hug her back now. Duh.

Maybe Minkowski had been aiming for a simple back-pat of camaraderie, but Lovelace had already realized that wrapping her up tight and holding her close was what she ought to have done when Minkowski had started crying in front of her, as opposed to standing there like a useless moron. So that's what she was going to do now, and Minkowski was just going to have to deal with it. Except the many unspoken things she was saying with the hug meant it didn't come out quite so gentle.

Lovelace heard a shaky little sigh of breath that might've been a chuckle, and might've been her accidentally squeezing the air out of Minkowski's lungs. Lovelace just kept her eyes on the door to Eiffel's quarters as Minkowski settled against her, the both of them accepting that they weren't going anywhere any time soon.

"At least we're all kind of a mess right now..." she heard Minkowski say to the silence. And, she supposed, to Hera, whose pointed lack of commentary on whatever the hell was going on here Lovelace hoped was a good sign.

"'Kind of'? Uh, hi, have you _met_ me?" Lovelace said, matching her wavering effort at humor. God, Renee Minkowski deserved so much more than the _bullshit_ Goddard had given her.

Minkowski started laughing, only for it to turn to soft sobs, then full blown tears as Lovelace tried placing a hand on the back of her neck to comfort her. She felt Minkowski's hands clench in her shirt, squeezing her so hard Lovelace couldn't have let go even if she had actually wanted to. Tears prickled at the corners of her own eyes as she stared ahead, the door to Lambert's old room, Eiffel's old room, becoming a blur of cold, gray metal.

She wanted so badly to make this better for her. Minkowski deserved it, deserved so much goddamn more than all this, she and Eiffel and Hera all did. But all Lovelace had was herself. A warm embrace and a shoulder to cry on. And sure, maybe that was precisely what Minkowski needed right now, but feeling her shoulders hitch as she wailed silently into Lovelace's shoulder made her wish it was so much more.

Lovelace settled for what she had, breathing out slowly and hiding her face in the crook of Minkowski’s neck to keep herself steady, hoping the "I'm sorry," that escaped her was too muffled for Minkowski to hear.

How long they stayed like that, Lovelace couldn't be sure. Time had that weird liquid quality to it again, warping like the little saltwater tearbubbles she glimpsed drifting through the haze of the corridor. Acute moments where someone mumbled little apologies and heard "it's okay, it's alright" in return, even though they weren't. Nothing was, and there was nothing for the words to do except _be said_. Didn't crying excrete excess stress hormones through your tear glands or something? Yeah, that sounded about right for what was going on right now. Lovelace barely even looked up when her back bumped against a wall, bringing their aimless drifting to a halt, curled up and hollowed out, holding Minkowski in her arms in their stuffy little bubble. It felt like it might go on forever if they let it, caught in each other's gravitational fields.

Eventually, someone's attempt to breathe through the gross amount of snot you got from any good cry session broke through the background noise. It must've been her, because Minkowski was the one to ask, "...you okay?"

Lovelace quickly swiped at her nose with the back of her hand before answering, "heh, always. You?"

"Same as ever, really."

"New star, new alien pen pals, same shitty boat as always..." And that was all that really needed to be said.

They were at an impasse - someone would have to move first. Someone would have to be the one to say they had work to do. Seal off this section of the Hephaestus soon, give this shitty boat every edge it could get to last as long as possible, whether help was coming or not. Which meant clearing out Eiffel's room first, which meant breaking out of each other's orbits, where it felt like the cracks in the walls would catch up to them just a little bit slower if they stayed there, in their stuffy little bubble of tears and warmth and the strangest kind of safety.

Minkowski pulled back first, responsible person that she was and all, and Lovelace let her embrace go slack to let her go. She felt suddenly exposed, like Minkowski backing away too quickly would leave something vulnerable out in the open now that she'd dumped some of her feelings all over her (hopefully she wouldn't mind the wet patch of tears and/or snot Lovelace had left on her shirt. Oops). Maybe Minkowski felt the same way, because she didn't unwind her arms from around Lovelace's shoulders right away, either. They were no longer huddled together, but they were still basically flush up against each other. Eye contact was made, and Lovelace was suddenly aware of how close the person she'd just been holding like a lifeline really was.

Neither of them moved. Both seemed to be waiting for the other to let go first. There was a... something, in Minkowski's eyes. A question, a curiosity, something she was turning over in her head that was different from the usual care and anxiety that was, _very_ sincerely, the background radiation to all that she did. Was it softer around the edges too, like this whole weird, _weird_ encounter had been?

...or, as Lovelace's reflexes were telling her, she might've been about to say something, which brought up the urge to pre-empt her because _whatever_ it was it was just going to make this bizarro shitstorm of grief-affection-guilt-anger-"oh my god why am I still on the Hephaestus awaiting my impending doom AGAIN"-fear even more muddled, and that was sort of the last thing she needed at the moment. But something blocked her. For once no snarky remarks came to mind (which was a damn shame, because this might be the last time she'd be able break out the brazenly-flirtatious ones with a clear conscious). No, in the absence of a prepared Lovelace Comment, she found Minkowski just... staring. Looking at her. Up close. _Gazing_ might have been the word, if that didn't bring with it a whole host of implications that meant Lovelace _really_ needed to reconsider what was going on here.

...God, she was overthinking this. _Why were neither of them looking away?_

This was not the first time Lovelace had been up in Minkowski's personal space, nor he first time she'd had a chance to observe her from this extreme-lack-of distance. She already knew, for instance, that Minkowski had hazel eyes. Wasn't the first time Lovelace had noticed them, or the freckles dusting the bridge of her nose, or the hairline scar running thru her left eyebrow. Though, now that she thought about it, she'd started noticing her gray hairs more and more since the star had turned colors and the station's hull had cracked in the resentful silence of Eiffel's absence (And really, how dare this woman even entertain doubts that she was its Commander, when you had _that_ kind of heavy-handed symbolism going for you?)-- 

_But._ But. Maybe it was the angle and the way her eyes caught the light just then. You know, if you ignored that "the light" was the godawful florescent strips and didn't let the red rims around them spoil the romanticism of it all, and instead, focused on how they became golden corona in the center of blue-green. Like a distant memory of warm sunlight through dappled green forest.

Yeah, Lovelace had noticed before, but never really _noticed._ Not this close. Not like this, with no way to hide or get around how long and intently she was staring.

...and damnit, now she'd been staring for too long, hadn't she? Now it was incriminating. Now it was _weird._ And if Lovelace pulled away first, it would be saying she'd noticed it was weird, which meant she'd been thinking about it, which was as good as admitting "hi, I'm Isabel Lovelace, resident useless lesbian", and you never really knew how well _that_ was going to go over. And now Minkowski had bitten her lower lip like she was finally going to say something and Lovelace's eyes had gone right to the little motion, and too late, Minkowski had her dead to rights. Then _her_ gaze flicked down to steal a glance at Lovelace's lips, and-

And there was no way she could be reading this whole thing right, right?

Neither of them pulled away. On the contrary, everything in her that was shouting at her to do so was being ignored, in favor of matching that oh-so-specific way Minkowski tilted her head - had she done it first, or had Lovelace? Or were they mirroring one another? How long had they been staring at each other from inches away, gazing into each other's eyes like something out of a bad romance novel? It felt like hours. It felt like mere moments. They were leaning in close, slowly, coming together at the speed it took whole galaxies to collide. Estimated time of impact: somewhere around the heat death of the universe.

"...Captain?" Minkowski breathed into the silence of their personal binary orbit, so close and so quiet that Lovelace more felt the word than heard it. She realized then that she was stuck. Frozen in place, unable to close the chasm between them. If she moved at all, if she even _breathed_ wrong, the spell would be broken and reality would resume. She didn't _want_ reality to resume.

Time melted and warped around them, like glass being stretched into those twisting decorative columns. Rationally, Isabel knew that if she waited and did nothing, Minkowski would either pull away, or close the distance herself and _please, please just kiss me already._

(Or, third option: she would actually forget to breathe and just pass out.)

But because she'd never been good at just waiting and doing nothing, Lovelace answered "yeah?" just as quietly, daring to press her thumb against the back of Minkowski's neck in the smallest sign of encouragement.

Minkowski took in a soft breath, and Lovelace felt her heart actually _skip a stupid beat_ as, just for a moment, she was afraid that Minkowski would say something, ask what exactly they were doing, or if she was sure, or any number of things that would cost them both their nerve- but then, all in an instant, Minkowski had jumped the gap between them.

And maybe the world could've ended then, and it would almost – _almost_ \- have been okay.

The kiss was short and simple, Minkowski's chapped lips pressed to hers before they parted to exhale, Lovelace's hand cupped to the base of her skull inviting her in for a second kiss, a third. Her eyes had slid closed, taking in the feeling of Minkowski's short hair threading between her fingers, how their noses brushed, and their lips catching on one another where they'd each bitten them in anxiety. Again, Lovelace was enveloped in Minkowski's embrace, holding onto one another not as if clutching lifelines but just... well... holding one another. Being held. Minkowski kissing her before they both tentatively eased into the warm silence, foreheads coming to touch as they rested against one another.

As the pounding of her heart, hard enough that it threatened to rattle her entire body from the inside out, finally settled, some part of Lovelace had the quiet thought that she was very glad to be rid of her dead man's switch. Not only would the bomb have gone off a long time ago, but turning all of... _that_ into a bunch of nervous beeping would have completely killed the mood. Whatever the mood was, anyhow. Whatever all _this_ was.

Finally breaking away from her was like waking up, knowing that sooner as opposed to later, you ought to be leaving your warm, cozy little nest and getting on with the strain of the day. Minkowski was the one to move first, as Lovelace had predicted, slipping from her grasp while she took her own sweet time coming down from their waking dream. When she finally opened her eyes, she found herself following Minkowski's gaze to the door to Eiffel's quarters... which was now several feet down the hall from where it had been before they disappeared inside their little moment.

Minkowski caught Lovelace’s eye and broke out into a nervous giggle, and Lovelace found herself cracking up with her. Somewhere in there was a silent agreement that, whatever the hell had just happened between them, they weren't even gonna try and talk about it right now. The dreamy haze they'd been lost in gradually began to slip away, though the ache of grief it had been replacing came back feeling different, somehow both more and less immediate all at once.

And so, when they pulled themselves back up the corridor to Eiffel’s quarters, still chortling at how preoccupied they were to have floated this far without noticing, it was like nothing had happened at all. The only evidence remaining, outside of no doubt-bizarre spectacle Hera had saved in her memory now, was the feeling mixing around in Lovelace's chest, and how Minkowski now stood like some of the weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Not all of it, not by a long shot, but... some. You could see it in the long sigh of relief she let out before speaking.

“…I don’t know if I want to do this yet, Captain. I…" She shrugged at her helplessly, "Well, I don’t know why, even if he is... gone.”

Lovelace just nodded. “'s okay. We can try again tomorrow.”

“Maybe later today? This section needs to be closed off sooner as opposed to later, and if… _when_ help arrives, he must have somebody back home who’d want to keep those things.”

“In that case, I’ll meet you back here at, oh, let’s say, 1900?”

“Sounds good. Thank you, Captain.”

“Any time, Commander.”

They moved off together before parting ways a little while later at a juncture, Minkowski headed to the bridge and Lovelace down to engineering. They glanced back at each other just before moving apart, hands drifting as though to reach out for one another again, and the look on Minkowski’s face made… _something_ twinge inside of Lovelace. The chill of the recycled air now felt just a little bit sharper after the warmth of their embrace.

But it only lasted for a moment. Engineering would be warmer anyway, with how the number one engine kept overheating, and even if there was nothing to be done to fix it, somebody still had to keep the heat damage from breaking anything else. Somebody had to keep the greenhouse stable so their air supply wasn’t compromised, and that also meant somebody had to make sure the water lines were properly rerouted so they didn’t freeze over in the quarantined parts of the station and burst the pipes. They’d given themselves enough time already. Whatever all _this_ was could be dealt with later. Eventually.

At some point.

But right now, people still needed them, and that meant they had jobs to do. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is just an emotionally-fraught time period in canon and I'm actually kind of glad the writers gave us license to do whatever with it? What's up, I've listened to this podcast all the way through at least five times since June and I have a lot of very gay feelings for and about these two and am going to shower them in all the self-indulgent fanwork a ship of this caliber deserves, which is "all of it". 
> 
> Also while double-checking my terminology for the title I was tempted to name it "Galactic Cannibalism" for a moment because it turns out, that's what it's called when two galaxies actually collide and merge into one another. 
> 
> Thank you Kat, for both nudging me towards this show and also giving me this idea.


End file.
